Chattahoochee bike trail to get wider, better

For years, bicyclists who ride the Sope Creek trail near the Chattahoochee River have complained about its pitfalls — the erosion and the tight turns where bikers, hikers and dogs share narrow spaces. Those shortcomings took some of the thrill away from “murder 3,” “clavicle hill” and other spots that challenged machine and muscle.

That ride is about to get better. Starting next month, four portions of the trail at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area will be realigned to improve drainage and safety for cyclists and others who use the Cobb County path. It’s part of a long-range plan to make the ridges and hills near the river more accessible to outdoor enthusiasts.

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Mark Davis / mrdavis@ajc.com

Tom Tomaka (left) and Julia Radmann pedal a stretch of the Sope Creek trail at the Chattahoochee River recreational area. Tomaka and Radmann are members of the Southeastern Offroad Biking Association, and plan to help improve the trail.

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Members of the Atlanta chapter of the Southeast Offroad Bicycle Association, or SORBA, say they’ll volunteer shovels and time when the work starts.

“The trail is not capable [at present] of taking all the use it gets,” said SORBA Atlanta president Tom Tomaka. A Virginia-Highland resident, Tomaka, 49, has been riding the trail for about five years. He and other chapter members last month worked on the trail, and plan more work days this year.

The trail follows a century-old farm road for about three miles. Beginning at a parking lot just off Paper Mill Road, the path arrows past Sibley Pond before heading into forests that rise, then fall. It’s a series of sharp-angled turns and plunging descents over rocks and timbers that ends at a gravel, multi-use trail near the Chattahoochee.

At places, the trail is wide enough for nearly a dozen cyclists to pedal along, side-by-side; at other places, the path is strictly single-file.

Some of that crowding should ease this spring and summer, said Dan Brown, superintendent of the Chattahoochee recreational area. The National Park Service will oversee the realignment project, which is part of a $40,000 grant.

“The trail system sort of evolved” without professional planning at Sope Creek, Brown said. Some stretches, which should have followed the edges of hillsides to avoid erosion, instead plunged straight down hills. They became sluices for runoff.

Parts of the trail, Brown said, “are difficult, it not impossible, to maintain. It has become horribly, horribly eroded.”

The realignment will begin with heavy machinery that claws new paths along the sides of hills, reducing the potential for erosion, and opening new sight lines that allow users to see farther ahead. The old segments will be closed to hikers and bikers.

SORBA has promised to do fine work by hand to finish the new segments.

“It’s kind of like roughing a house out, then waiting for someone else to come in with drywall,” Tomaka said.

The park service plans a ribbon-cutting for the improved trail in July. Then, Brown said, the park service will turn its attention to the next step — creating a figure 8-style trail on the site where a farm road became a trail. But that will call for more money. “We’ll just have to seek more funding,” Brown said.